Multinational Corporations Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Multinational Corporations - Essay Example Globalization-brought about by advancement in technology, transport, and communication- has made it possible for multinational corporations to spread very fast. MNC have both negative and positive impacts on developing countries. Below I have discussed the impacts starting with positive impacts and lastly negative impacts. Employment It is a common thing in developing countries for the governments to actively seek for foreign investors. Multinational corporations provide both direct and indirect employments to developing countries which is a major challenge in these countries. Banking and telecommunication companies are some of the most common companies which have developed over large regions. Due to the size of these companies they create more job opportunities. Creating these job opportunities also account for increased domestic expenditure and income. These companies introduce new technologies to the employees and sometimes even provide training to their employees. This reduces th e cost of the government in training its citizens. Taxation revenues One of the major challenges facing developing countries is provision of social amenities to their citizens. This is due to poverty and lack of enough revenues for the government to provide such amenities as education and health services. Lack of basic education for these countries is one major cause of why they lag behind in terms of development. Poor health services contribute to high mortality rates especially to children under the age of five years. Foreign companies seeking to invest in these developing countries have always been welcomed so that they can help these countries add on to their revenues. Taxation adds to the domestic economy of the country where MNCs have invested. Due to this investment there is a direct flow of capital in the host country. Where these corporations are producing companies, they may save the host country’s revenue in terms of import. The companies may produce products that were previously imported to an extent of transforming them into exports. This will in turn earn the host country more revenue. Another source of revenue for the host country’s government is the money taxed directly from the salaries of workers. Previously we saw that multinational corporations provide employment to citizens of the host nations. The government earns revenue from salaries of all its workers in the country. From this discussion it is clear that presence of multinational corporations in a country has a significant impact on the host nation. Growth and efficiency Capital is a basic need of production; however, this is a rare commodity in underdeveloped and developing countries. MNCs offer foreign direct investment (FDI) to these countries. Developing countries may have enough natural resources available in their countries but lack resources in terms of capital and equipment. In mining, for example, most developing countries cannot afford the machinery required lea ve alone the capital. This is the opportunity for large MNCs specialized in the field to chip in. The host nations in this case have got no choice but to enter into partnership with the company. Another long term advantage to the host nation is improvement in technology. Most developing countries lack the technology needed in many industries. Introduction of foreign technology into these countries is always an advantage. The machinery and structures built, in the long run, will belong to the host nation. Sometimes the new technology is transferred the

Wars of German Unification Essay Example for Free

Wars of German Unification Essay On January 18, 1871, Otto Von Bismarck was able to create the German Empire by unifying a number of independent states under one nation. This was also known as the unification of Germany. However, it order to build the German nation, three wars had been fought; the Prusso-Danish War in 1864, the Austro-Prussian War in 1866 and Franco-Prussian War from 1870 up to 1871. Although these wars were declared by the opponents of Germany, Germans believed that need a united and strong nation.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The Prusso-Danish War also known as the Second Schleswig War took place in 1864 in which Denmark fought against the Prussia and Austria. The war was fought in order to take control of the duchies by the time the Danish king died without a heir that is accepted by the confederation of Germany. It was because of the existence of conflicting political system within the state as well as ethnic controversy in Schleswig that brought this war. The second war that was fought by Germany is the Austro-Prussian War or the Seven Weeks War that was fought in 1866. The war was between the Austrian empire and Prussia together with Italy. German states were also part of the war taking different sides. Northern German states were unified as a result of the war. Bismarck was encouraged to go to war because of the advantages being enjoyed by the Prussian army over the Austrian empire and by that time, the Prussian army was developing, giving it the advantage in the war for it can provide the army with things that it needs to win. The Prussian king also decided to go on war although he was reluctant; it was William 1st who made the war possible. The third war of German unification was the Franco-Prussian War or the Franco-German War that took place on July 1870 up to May 1871 between Prussia and France and also signalled the rise of imperialism and of German military power. It can be said that it was Bismarck who is the reason for the declaration of the Franco-German War. It was â€Å"Ems dispatch†, the communication between Bismarck and King William, published by Bismarck that inflamed the French feeling and later declaring the war. The war was intended by Bismarck to unify the states of Southern Germany. These three wars had been fought in order to unify Germany and gave birth to the German Empire. Reference KMLA. (13, January 2008). Bismarck’s unification of Germany. Retrieved January 27, 2008   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   from http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/germany/bismarck.html.

The Hollywood Effect Of The Reel Bad Arabs Media Essay

The Hollywood Effect Of The Reel Bad Arabs Media Essay Watching Dr. Jack Shaheen documentary Reel bad Arabs, in which he discusses almost a 1000 Hollywood films featuring an Arab and concludes that the vast majority of which portray Arabs in a distorting manner, I found myself really fond of the idea of the power of media in positioning peoples minds in favor of a secret agenda and so forth, I found that I deeply agree with Dr.Shaheens claim that the Hollywood movie industry, almost always portrays Arabs as bad since it is influenced by the US foreign policy agenda. How Media Affects Public Opinion In the last 50 years the media influence has grown exponentially with the advance of technology. We now live in a society that depends on information and communication to keep moving in the right direction. The media has a huge impact on society and also in public opinion. It can shape the public opinion in different ways depending of what is the objective. Repetition Effect Al tikrar biallem il hemar -By repetition even the donkey learns-, this Arab proverb encapsulates how effective repetition can be when it comes to education: how we learn by repeating an exercise over and over again until we can respond almost reflexively. For more than a century now, Hollywood, too, has used repetition as a teaching tool, tutoring movie audiences by repeating over and over, in film after film, insidious images of the Arab people. From earlier times to the present day consider how these images have affected honest discourse and public policy. Building Stereotypes Stereotyping has existed with us since the beginning of time in our day to day life .With these repetitive patterns going over and over in front of our eyes, as audience, we start building our own images about others based on these patterns, breeding them into our minds and revitalizing them whenever stuck in a situation . Bottom-line, instead of getting to know the truth, we tend to resort to our preconceived notions rather than judging things as they are, which involuntarily, builds stereotypes in our minds. Manipulating Public Opinion Normally, stereotypes are fast and fairly effective because not everyone can be able to travel to every nation and verify the true state of affairs, thus techniques of misinformation and name calling are used by media outlets in attempt to convince the public to belief generalities made about a particular group, in this case Arabs, to be true in areas such as religion or politics. For example, after the attacks of 9/11 the media gave a huge coverage of the event and exposed Osama guilty for the attack as they were told by the authorities. This shaped the public opinion to support the war on terrorism, the same happened with the war on Iraq. The problem is that if media received inaccurate information then the public opinion supported a wrong cause, and this is the power of public opinion influence. Hollywood As A Source Of Knowledge And Influence A Positioning Weapon Hollywood movies have been around now for more than century and have and will continue to impact us and future generations. Nowadays, Hollywoods motion pictures reach nearly everyone. How Arabs Are Portrayed In Hollywood Seen through Hollywoods distorted lenses, Arabs look different and threatening. Projected along racial and religious lines, the stereotypes are deeply ingrained in American cinema. According to Dr. Shaheen words, What is an Arab? In countless films, Hollywood alleges the answer: Arabs are brute murderers, sleazy rapists, religious fanatics, oil-rich dimwits, and abusers of women. They [the Arabs] all look alike to me, quips the American heroine in the movie The Sheik Steps Out (1937). All Arabs look alike to me, admits the protagonist in Commando (1968). Decades later, nothing had changed. Quips the U.S. Ambassador in Hostage (1986), I cant tell one [Arab] from another. Wrapped in those bed sheets they all look the same to me. In Hollywoods films, they certainly do black beard, headdress, dark sunglasses, in the background-a limousine, harem maidens, oil wells, camels. Beginning with Imar the Servitor (1914), up to and including The Mummy Returns (2001), a synergy of images equates Arabs from Syria to the Sudan with quintessential evil. In hundreds of movies evil Arabs stalk the screen. We see them assaulting just about every imaginable foeAmericans, Europeans, Israelis, legionnaires, Africans, fellow Arabs, evenfor heavens sakeHercules and Samson. Dr Shaheen believes that such Arab images serves not only for dehumanation, but mainly for increasing abhorrence towards that group of people in an attempt to back up the U.S foreign policies and agendas. The findings of a recent study suggest that Hollywood films influence viewers perceptions and attitudes towards Arabs extensively. Similar approaches to Dr. Shaheens were taken and mostly rendered the same conclusions such as Jamie C. Friess, which pointed out that Hollywoods representation of the Middle East ebbed and flowed with the foreign policy realities of the United States across time underlying the belief in the presence of a link between U.S. diplomacy and popular films portrayal of Arabs. Possible Reasons Behind Hollywood Portrayal Complement American Foreign Policy The interpretations of Hollywoods representation of Arabs involve different, often contradictory, types of image. They also suggest that the intensification of the Arabs stereotypical image over the last century from comic villains to foreign devils did not occur in a vacuum but, certainly, with the intertwinement of both political and cultural interests in the region. It is believed that this was motivated indirectly by U.S imperial objectives. Justify War In Palestine, Iraq And Afghanistan Arabs are politically characterized as soldiers of Allah with no mercy and who do terrible things; they are not just villains but also dangerous and they need to be politically and militarily contained. The concept shows how the situation in the region is badly in need of help Western, and in particular American. Just the needed situation that can fairly justify wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq and work as a great cover of the real intentions behind such wars, which is clearly economic-oil-.Moreover; keeping the international world silent about the ongoing Palestinians killings. We -Arabs- Fail To Fix Our Image To bring about fundamental changes in how motion pictures project Arabs, a systematic lobbying effort is needed. Though the Arab-American and Muslim-American presence is steadily growing in number and visibility in the United States, Regrettably, only a few Arab-Americans meet with and discuss the stereotype with filmmakers. Though when dialogue does occur, some discriminatory portraits are altered. Conclusion In conclusion, I would like to re-insist on the fact that Hollywood movies- as a media outlet- can influence public opinion extensively on the way Arabs are perceived and that they can actually serve, in one way or another, as a tool of manipulation or oven be manipulated themselves in order to enforce different governmental policies. Both the American authorities and corporate media helped to outline the Middle East within an ideological bias that shapes the public understanding of the region. Such a cultural discourse has stressed an epic struggle between the civilized, democratic, modern West and the brutalized, barbaric, primitive East. This manipulation should be processed to maintain the notion that these nations need, and will continue to need, American protection not just from their enemy but from themselves as well.

High-Dose Chemotherapies (HDC) and STAMP as Cancer Treatment

High-Dose Chemotherapies (HDC) and STAMP as Cancer Treatment STAMP Since the 1960s, high-dose chemotherapies (HDC) had been successful in curing acute leukemia and Hodgkins disease, but not that successful in curing solid tumors such as lung cancer and breast cancer. Chemotherapists were now wondering whether by increasing the power of the dosage, they could make HDC effective for treating solid cancer. But for most chemotherapy drugs, the dose limit depended on the bone marrow. How can one increase the drug dosage by five or ten times without destroying the bone marrow? Bone Marrow Transplantation In the late 1960s, Donnall Thomas had shown that bone marrow could be harvested from one patient and transplanted back either to the same patient (called autologous transplantation) or into another patient (called allogeneic transplantation). Allogeneic bone marrow transplantation was tricky, often deadly. It could lead to a deadly complication called graft-versus-host disease if the foreign marrow turned and attacked the body of the recipient. Autologous bone marrow transplantation (ABMT), on the other hand, was less risky. Here, the patients own marrow was harvested, frozen, and transplanted back into his body. STAMP By harvesting and freezing bone marrow, then implanting the marrow after HDC, doctors were theoretically able to break through the limit of toxicity; the so-called red ceiling. It was now possible to give five- or even tenfold the typical doses of drugs. Among the first proponent of this strategy was Emil Frie, who was now the director of Farbers institute. By early 1980s, Fred had convinced himself that a high dose chemotherapy combined with autologous bone marrow transplantation (HDC/ABMT), was the only conceivable solution in cancer therapy. He called this protocol Solid Tumor Autologous Marrow Program, or STAMP. To develop this protocol, Frei recruited William Peters as a fellow at the institute in 1982. By December 1984, 32 women had completed the Phase I study of the regimen, designed to investigate safety. The researchers proceeded with Phase II trials, which showed very promising results. But randomized controlled trials (Phase III) were needed to confirm the benefit of STAMP. In 1985, William Peters left the Faber institute to set up the trial at Duke University in North Carolina. He also persuaded the Cancer and Leukemia Group B (CALGB) to sponsor a multi-center, randomized controlled trial. AIDS In March 1981, a team of doctors reported eight cases of Kaposis sarcoma in a cohort of men in New York. All eight of the men were homosexual. One of the men was also diagnosed with a rare pneumonia called PCP, which only occurs in humans when the immune system is severely compromised. Between June and August 1981, additional clusters of PCP, cryptococcal meningitis, Kaposis sarcoma, and rare lymphomas were reported in young men in cities throughout America. The common pattern behind all these diseases, aside from their bias towards gay men, was a total collapse of the immune system. A letter in Lancet called the disease gay compromise syndrome. Others called it GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). In July 1982, it was called acquired immuno-deficiency syndrome, or AIDS. In January 1983, Luc Montagnier, a virologist at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, discovered a virus in a lymph node biopsy from a young gay man with Kaposis sarcoma. Montagnier soon deduced that this was an RNA virus that could convert its genes into DNA and lodge into the human genome-a retrovirus. He called his virus IDAV, immuno-deficiency associated viruses, arguing that it was likely the cause of AIDS. Montagniers discovery was corroborated in the spring of 1984 by Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute. Margaret Heckler, the Health and Human Services secretary, made this discovery public in the spring of 1984. We hope to have a vaccine ready for testing in about two years, she said. But AIDS activists, facing an epidemic that was decimating their community, could not afford to wait. In the spring of 1987, a group of volunteers form a group named the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. Led by a writer named Larry Kramer, ACT UP promised to transform the landscape of AIDS treatment using a kind of militant activism unprecedented in the history of medicine. The Map and the Parachute While William Peters was investigating the efficacy of the STAMP protocol, many oncologists had long assumed that the regimen was so effective that no trial would be needed. By the late 1980s, hospitals and private clinics offering high dose bone marrow transplantation (HDC/ABMT) for breast cancer had sprouted up all around the US, UK, and France. Insurance and Litigation Costs from $50,000 to $400,000 per patient, HDC/ABMT is an expensive therapy. Health maintenance organizations (HMOs), a popular form of health insurance in America, had refused to pay for these therapies because they regarded them as experimental and investigational. However, this would change after the landmark case, Fox v. Health Net in 1993. In 1991, a 38-year-old public-school teacher named Nelene Fox was diagnosed with breast cancer. She requested Health Net, her HMO, to pay for HDC/ABMT to treat her cancer. Health Net declined her request, stating this therapy was an unproven, experimental therapy. Foxs brother, an attorney named Mark Hiepler, took Health Net to court. By the summer of 1992, when Health Net refused yet another request for coverage, Fox went ahead with the therapy on her own. By then she had raised $220,000. On April 22, 1993, less than a year after the therapy, Fox died. Mark Hiepler sought damages from Health Net for delaying his sisters treatment. The crux of his case rested on the definition of the word investigational. HDC/ABMT could, he argued, hardly be considered an investigational procedure if every major clinics in the nation was offering it to patients. On December 28, 1993, a Californian jury awarded Foxs family $89 million. In late 1993, because of the lobbying efforts from a 47-year-old cancer patient named Charlotte Turner, the state of Massachusetts mandated coverage for HDC/BMT for eligible patients within the state. By the mid-1990s, seven states required HMOs to pay for HDC/ABMT, with similar legislation pending in seven other states. Between 1988 and 2002, 86 cases were filed against HMOs that had refused to pay for transplants, of which 47 were successful. Research Misconduct Werner Bezwoda, an oncologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa was one of the most prominent and successful HDC/ABMT therapists. In May 1999, Werner Bezwoda presented his results at the annual meeting of the American College of Clinical Oncology in Atlanta. His results were spectacular: Eight and a half years after HDC/ABMT, 60% of his patients were alive, whereas only 20% survived in the control group. In contrast, the results presented from three other trials in the afternoon were not good. In one study, the researchers found not even a modest improvement, and complication rates considerably higher than the control arm. How do one reconcile these disparate results? In December 1999, a team of researchers flew off to South Africa to take a look at Bezwodas data. Upon arrival, they requested the log books for the 158 patients Bezwoda reported treating. He gave them log books for 58 and said the rest had been lost. The data he gave them was shoddy. Many records had unsigned, handwritten entries and there was no evidence that Bezwoda had randomly assigned patients. There were no records showing that any patients had received the standard treatment. One of Bezwodas purported breast cancer patients was actually a man. The entire thing had been a sham. Bezwodas protocol was completely fabricated and the whole thing was a fraud. A Final STAMP Trial In the summer of 1999, a final trial was designed to investigate whether STAMP might increase survival among patients with metastatic breast cancer. Results came in four years later: There was no discernible benefit. Cancer Undefeated In May 1997, eleven years after the 1986 Bailar-Smith analysis, Bailar was back with another appraisal of the progress on cancer. His article, entitled Cancer Undefeated, depicted the War on Cancer as a dynamic, moving battle against a dynamic, moving target. Between 1970 and 1994, cancer mortality had increased by about 6 percent, from 189 deaths per 100,000 to 201 deaths. Cancer mortality had increased among people over 55, but decreased by the same proportion among people under 55. Death rates from colon cancer, cervical and uterine cancer had decreased, mostly due to earlier detections (colonoscopy and Pap smears). Death rates for most forms of childrens cancer, Hodgkins disease and testicular cancer had also declined. Lung cancer was still the biggest killer, responsible for 25 percent of all cancer deaths. Overall death rates had increased by 6 percent. Death rates among men had peaked and dropped off by the mid-1980s, while death rates among women over the age of 55 had increased by 400 percent. The incidence of lung cancer was highest in people older than 55 and was lower in people under 55.

Biomechatronics Essay -- physics biomechatronic

When Luke Skywalker's hand was sliced off by Darth Vader in the trilogy Star Wars, he received a new prosthetic hand which was fully functional in use and appearance.Today, this science fiction is becoming reality as an exciting new technology called Biomechatronics is promising revolutionary advances in the field of prosthetics. As the name implies, biomechatronics merges man with machine. It is an interdisciplinary field including biology, neuroscience and physics. Biomechatronic scientists create devices that interact with human muscle, bone and the nervous systems with the goal of "assisting or enhancing human motor control that can be lost or impaired by trauma, disease, or birth defects." Today there is a great need in advances in the field of prosthetics. This demand is being generated in large measure by wounded veterans needing prosthetics. While new advances in body armor is saving lives, it is also leading to many limb injuries in soldiers who would not have usually survived. In the first two years of the Iraq war, over 200 soldiers lost limbs. While health care is still servicing wooden hands designed in the World War I era, many patients are unsatisfied with the unnatural movements, aesthetics, weight and lack of motion in these outdated prosthetics. Colonel Geoffrey Ling, a program manager for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who is overseeing a project to improve prosthetics says, "The best hand prosthetic one can get is a hook, right out of Peter Pan. It's heavy, it's clumsy and cosmetically, it's just horrid." That is why DARPA along with 70 million dollars to John Hopkin's Applied Physics Laboratory are spearheading the work. The projects goals are lofty: APL hopes to design an arm ... ...zine. (2007) On-line. http://www.baltimoremag.com Freudenrich, Craig Ph.D.. How Biomechatronics works. (2007) On-line. http://www.howstuffworks.com/biomechatronics.htm Su, Y. Fisher, M.H. Wolczowski, A. Bell, G.D. Burn, D. Gao, R. Basics of MRI-I. 19 May 2005 'Towards an EMG Controlled Prosthetic Hand Using a 3D Electromagnetic Positioning System' Instrument and Measurement vol. 1, p. 261-266. Guinnessy, Paul. Sept 2006. 'DARPA joins industry, academia to build better prosthetic arms' Physics Today p. 24-25. Unknown author. (2007) On-line. Nerve cells. http://www.cidpusa.org/physiology.htm Herr, Hugh Ph. D. White House/VA Conference / Emerging Technologies in Support of the New Freedom Initiative: Promoting Opportunities for People with Disabilities October 13-14, 2004. (2007) On-line. http://www.rehab.research.va.gov/whc2004/day1/pan-herr.html

Causation and Moral Responsibility for Death Essay -- Euthanasia Physi

Causation and Moral Responsibility for Death ABSTRACT: The distinction between killing and letting die has been a controversial element in arguments about the morality of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The killing/letting die distinction is based on causation of death. However, a number of causal factors come into play in any death; it is impossible to state a complete cause of death. I argue that John Mackie’s analysis of causation in terms of ‘inus factors,’ insufficient but non-redundant parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions, helps us to see that moral responsibility for death cannot rest on causation alone. In specifying the cause of death, some factors can be considered alternatively as either causal factors or merely parts of the presupposed background conditions. If a factor is moved from the background field into the causal field, the result is a changed background field. Comparisons of cases of killing and letting die often do just this; hence, the cases depend on different pres uppositions and the causation cannot be directly compared. Moral judgments determine how to apportion factors to the causal and background fields. The distinction between killing and letting die has been used by many to condemn euthanasia and assisted suicide while giving approbation to withdrawing life-support systems in at least some patients. In the recent United States Supreme Court decision which denies a right to physician-assisted suicide, Chief Justice Rehnquist writes that "when a patient refuses life sustaining medical treatment, he dies from an underlying fatal disease or pathology; but if a patient ingests lethal medication prescribed by a physician, he is killed by that medication." (1) It is doubtful, ho... ..., no.3 (1976): 15-16. (7) John Mackie, The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Causation, paperback edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). (8) Ibid., 60-62. (9) Ibid., 63. (10) Ibid., 66-67. This statement of a "gappy" universal is fundamentally the same as Mackie’s, but I have altered the formulation for consistency. (11) O.H. Green, "Killing and Letting Die," American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1980): 195-204, and Helga Kuhse, The Sanctity-of-Life Doctrine in Medicine: A Critique (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). (12) Kuhse, 50-51. (13) Ibid., 67-68. (14) Ibid., 68. (15) President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Deciding to Forego Life-Sustaining Treatment: Ethical, Medical, and Legal Issues in Treatment Decisions (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), 69.

Recommending a Low-Cost Customer Service Essay

Executive Summary Acme De Mexico’s Manager has requested assistance in developing a minimum cost daily assignment schedule for the customer service employees in their newly built store. Specifically, he wants to know the minimum total cost per day, which is the decision variable. He also wants to know the exact amount of part time and full time employees which will determine the total cost. The objective function is to minimize costs. Acme specified a minimum number of employees required for each shift, a maximum number of employees per shift, specific shifts for full time and part time workers, and a maximum percentage of 50% of the total hours for part time employees. These constraints were input into Microsoft solver, which determined $47,800 to be the minimum employee cost per day, employing 23 fulltime workers and 45 part time workers per day. Specific assumptions were made which will be discussed in detail, along with the impact of non-typical days. A sensitivity analysis will then be per formed to determine how the percentage of part time employees’ constraint affects the total cost per day. Introduction Now the Acme De Mexico has completed the building process, it is now time to properly staff the store. The store manager, Mr. Rodriguez, has requested a minimum cost daily assignment schedule for the customer service employees at the new store. In order to have Acme De Mexico become a profitable business, it must make the best use of its resources (Jacobs & Chase, 2013). In this case the resources are time, money, and employees. In order to provide Mr. Rodriguez with the information he requested, linear programming will be utilized. Linear programming is the â€Å"several related mathematical techniques used to allocate limited resources among competing demands in an optimal way† (Jacobs & Chase, 2013, appendix A). In this case, we are given the following information. This report will provide an employee assignment schedule for a typical day, developed with a linear programming model  (Attachment 1). This model and its cells will be referenced throughout the report. An explanation will be provided to explain the model to include the assumptions made. The report will also briefly touch on how non-typical days may affect the schedule. Employee Assignment Schedule Acme De Mexico is open daily, from 7:00am to 11:00pm. Employee shifts are broken out over those 16 hours. For every hour of the day, a minimum amount of employees are required to be on the floor, which is depicted in the table below. The minimum number of employees (limit) needed on the floor at a given hour is one of the constraints. This constraint is displayed in cells G22 though V22. Additionally, only 30 employees are allowed on the floor at any given time for safety reasons. This constraint can be seen in cells G26 though V26 This is also a constraint, or limit. See cells A5-21 through cells C5-21. Part time employees are paid $500 (Pesos) per day, and full time employees are paid $1100 per day. Another constraint is the hours worked by part time employees cannot exceed 50% of the total hours worked per day (total hours = part time+full time). This is displayed in cell F36. Excel solver was used to solve the decision variable (E33), which is set as the objective. Cells D5 though D21 are the number and type of employees per hour, and are variable. The goal is to determine the minimum total cost per day. This is our decision variable, and is found in cell E33 of Attachment 1. The constraints mentioned above are input into solver. The first line shows the total number of part time employees must be less than or equal to 50% to the total labor hours each day. The second line ensures that the changing values are integers. We do not want half an employee to show up for his or her shift. The third line constraint ensures that the number of employees per shift does not exceed 30. Lastly, the fourth line constraint took into account the minimum employees per shift as specified by Acme. Our objective function is to minimize Acme’s the total employee cost per day. The total employee cost per day was calculated by multiplying the number of fulltime workers per day (E8) by the salary per day (C31). This total is reflected in cell C33. The same was done for part time workers: (E21)*(D31)=(D33). These two numbers were then added together, (C33)+(D33)=(E33). Solver determined $47,800 (E33) to be the minimum employee cost per day, employing 23 fulltime workers and 45 part time workers per day. Assumptions According to Knode, a few key assumptions are made when using linear programming: â€Å"The assumption of a linear relationship (between the objectives, the constraints, etc.), the assumption of continuous relationships, and the assumption of non-negative relationships† (2011). Additionally, the assumption was made that the solution and variables would  be integers, that is, not a fraction of an employee. It is also assumed that variables and solutions will be non-negative numbers. It can be assumed that there are enough employees to cover for employees who call in sick. Non-Typical Days Non-typical days may affect the schedule. For example, employees may call in sick. Employees who are off may have to come in to cover these shifts, or employees may have to work overtime to cover for the sick employee. This could increase the daily cost if the overtime rate is more than the hourly rate. Overtime may also come into play during holidays or busy times of the year. Acme may decide to open earlier and/or stay open later during these times. Acme would need to hire more employees to cover the extra shifts, or employees would have to work overtime. Sensitivity Analysis Sensitivity Analysis allows us to look at â€Å"variations in key aspects of the problem that could change the baseline answer† (Knode, 2011). One such key aspect is the constraint that hours worked by part time employees cannot exceed 50% of the total hours worked per day. The percentage of part time employees was varied to explore the possible outcomes. The results are displayed in the table below. It is interesting to note that with 0% part time employees, the total cost is the lowest. Conclusion Linear programming is a very useful tool which can help mangers solve many problems, including the problem of employee staffing. In the Acme De Mexico case, the decision variable was the minimum total cost per day for employee staffing. This also required determining the number of part time and full time employees per shift. Constraints were given and were input into solver, which resulted in a minimum daily cost of $47,800, with 23 full time employees and 45 part time employees. References Knode, C.S. (2011). Linear programming – Part 1 – Formulating the problem . Retrieved from: http://vimeo.com/duffer44/linear-programming-part-1 Jacobs, F.R & Chase, R.B. (2013). Operations and supply management: The core, 3e. Chapter 1 and Appendix A